Alex Duchnowski


2025

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Collaborative Problem-Solving in an Optimization Game
Isidora Jeknic | Alex Duchnowski | Alexander Koller
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Dialogue agents that support human users in solving complex tasks have received much attention recently. Many such tasks are NP-hard optimization problems that require careful collaborative exploration of the solution space. We introduce a novel dialogue game in which the agents collaboratively solve a two-player Traveling Salesman problem, along with an agent that combines LLM prompting with symbolic mechanisms for memory, state tracking and problem-solving. Our best agent solves 45% of games optimally in self-play. It also demonstrates an ability to collaborate successfully with human users and generalize to unfamiliar graphs.